


Some Kind of Record

by White_Marker



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Human, M/M, Nico di Angelo Speaks Italian, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 18:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17986088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/White_Marker/pseuds/White_Marker
Summary: "Will Solace lives in an apartment building outside of New York, where the pavement of the city yields to fields and greenery. Next to the towering block there is a strawberry field, where he and his downstairs neighbours, Lou Ellen Blackstone and Cecil Markowitz, sometimes steal the wild, ripe fruit during the summer. It makes his hands sticky with red stains."a.k.a.Will gets two new upstairs neighbours, Hazel and Nico. The summer unfolds.





	Some Kind of Record

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, yo, first foray into Rick Riordan fandom.
> 
> I read these books ages ago, and was always interested in Nico, because he is dark and stormy and angry, and I like that.

Will Solace lives in an apartment building outside of New York, where the pavement of the city yields to fields and greenery. Next to the towering block there is a strawberry field, where he and his downstairs neighbours, Lou Ellen Blackstone and Cecil Markowitz, sometimes steal the wild, ripe fruit during the summer. It makes his hands sticky with red stains.

This summer has been dry. The fields have become barren and have shrivelled up, the mud cracking dry and open in vein-like patterns. The paths meandering from the apartment to the fields are dried up. Will’s sneakers are dusty.

The wind here is not soft and breezy; it blows violently and assaults your face with whips of air. The entire county has turned brown and yellow during the summer and the rains have come down perhaps a handful of times since the end of February. The climate is arid, but not too much so to not support any vegetation; in fact, wild thorns and bushes grow all over the hilly slopes. Lizards crawl and zig zag in furtive bursts and disappear into the undergrowth of the shrubs.

Will has lived here for over four years. He shares his apartment with Lee and Michael, his two brothers. He commutes to the local hospital, AC, Apollo Central, where he has worked since moving, every morning by car. He is an anaesthesiologist. He and Lou Ellen, who is a nurse in paediatrics, carpool most mornings when their shifts coincide. Lou Ellen and Cecil are a few years older than Will. Cecil works a regular nine-to-five job behind the counter at the post office, where he has to deal with grumpy grannies who complain about the increasing cost of postage stamps and a boss who leers at him appreciatively – Cecil does not appreciate this, despite the fact that he feels strangely flattered and uncomfortable at the same time. Lou Ellen and Cecil have never dated, as many people think. “Oh, _ew_ ,” said Lou Ellen when Will had hinted at a romance. Cecil didn’t look the slightest bit bothered and grinned at his friend good-naturedly.

The apartment above Will has been empty for a few months. One morning, as he closes his front door, he feels a presence behind him. He turns around and spots a figure carrying two cardboard boxes.

“Hi!” says Will.

He hears a grunt coming from behind the boxes.

“Gods, sorry, can I help you? You look like you’re about to keel over from the weight.”

“No,” comes the curt answer.

A girl with frizzy hair and dark skin bounds up the stairs. She says to the tower of boxes, “ _Hai bisogno di aiuto?_ Here let me,” and she takes one of the boxes. She sees Will standing with his keys in his hands, and gives him a kind, shy smile. “Hello. We are your new neighbours.”

“Oh,” says Will. “Upstairs?”

“Yes. This is my brother, Nico, and I’m Hazel.”

Now that Will can see the guy’s face, he can’t help but note that they look about as different as night and day. Nico is pale with a shock of curly black hair and wears a sullen expression on his face, whereas Hazel seems sunny and bright. Her eyes shine. His eyes are dark. Will cannot see where his pupils end and his irises begin.

“Well, hi!” says Will. “My name is Will … I -,” he falters at the glare he receives from Nico. “I live … ehm, here.” He taps his fingers on his front door for good measure. A voice booms from behind the door, a loud baritone.

Nico’s eye dart from the door to Will.

Hazel laughs. “What’s that? Who’s that?”

“My brother. The penniless poet. He likes to dabble in opera from time to time.”

“Really?” says Hazel. “Wow. You know, I myself –”

“Hazel,” interrupts Nico rudely. “ _Abbiamo ancora una dozzina di scattole a sistemare. Dozzine.”_

“ _Perché sei così sgarbo?_ ” Hazel says. Her brows crease into a small frown

Nico huffs. “ _Lasciami in pace,_ ” he replies tersely.

Will doesn’t recognize the language they’re speaking.

Hazel turns to Will with an apologetic look, “Sorry. We should get a head start.” Nico has already marched up the stairs, leaving the two of them behind.

Will relieves the tension with a bright smile. “I’ve got to go, too, anyhow. Work.” He motions to his scrubs.

“Don’t mind him,” Hazel advises. She readjusts the box on her hips. “He’s naturally sulky. He barks at anyone attempting to make conversation. Nice to meet you, Will.”

“Yeah, nice to meet you.”

Will goes off to work and thinks of those tempestuous eyes – then curses himself for it.

 

—

 

The next time Will sees Nico, Will has just finished a long shift at the hospital. The summer sun is still out, buzzing and fat, low on the horizon in a splay of reddish gold.

Nico is not tall. He does not seem old, either, and Will wonders if a fixation on a near adolescent is a good idea. How old is he?

Nico, gangly and wearing an oversized black shirt emblazoned with some punk band’s logo (Will does not listen to punk, or rock, or anything like that). Will has parked his car in the lot of the building and Lou Ellen sprints ahead of him, muttering something about a pressing bladder. Her hasty movements shock Nico out of a daze and he shoots her a dirty look, a look she altogether misses.

“Nico,” says Will in greeting. He conjures up his best smile.

Nico grunts. After finally dropping his glare, Nico assesses him sneakily – or so he thinks –, pursing his lips around a cigarette, halfway smoked. He takes a puff, another, and offers a drag to Will.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know?”

Nico rolls his eyes.

“I’m a doctor,” Will feels compelled to say. He feels a cramped need to defend himself. For not smoking. Gods.

“Right,” says Nico. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

The surprise and disbelief – a reaction blown out of proportion, Will is well aware, but he can’t help it – is not visible on his face, because Nico does not apologize.

“William. Will.”

“Nice to meet you, Will.” Coming from his sister, the words are friendly and warm, but here it is a platitude, empty and stupid. Judging by Nico’s uninterested frown, it is not, indeed, particularly nice to meet Will.

A need to fill the silence bubbles up. “How’s the move going? Everything in place?”

“Almost, I guess.”

“Right.”

The conversation is stilted and Nico does nothing to alleviate the awkwardness. Instead, he continues to frown, sucks on his cigarette and blows smoke sideways, all the while keeping his eyes trained everywhere but on Will.

“You should come over, sometimes,” Will blurts out. Why? He has no idea. _Get a grip, Solace,_ he berates himself, _you’re coming on too strong._ “You know, as neighbours do,” he adds hurriedly.

Nico grunts once more and gives him a quick once-over. Does not look in Will’s eyes. He dumps his cigarette in the wet gutter. After a long drought, is has started to drizzle quietly.

“There’s a garbage bin right there,” Will says, pointing to the bin.

Nico appears a little surprised. “Sorry,” he says in a measured tone. “I won’t do it again.”

The two of them stand under the roof of the entrance of the building. The sun sinks lower until it disappears behind the horizon. There is an odd mix of heat and humidity in the air.

“Hazel wanted to invite you, actually,” says Nico.

“Oh, that’s nice of her.”

“Mh-mh.”

The silence drags on gracelessly and Will is dying to say something. He feels himself swell with a need to impress this guy, despite not knowing him in the least. He wants to say something witty or charming, but his mind blanks.

Nico saves him from embarrassment by giving him a little wave, turning around to go inside, and calling, “We’ll get together then, at some point. As neighbours do.”

 

—

 

Hazel knocks on his door a day later. She invites him over for drinks on a Wednesday evening. Lou Ellen and Cecil, who had invaded Will’s apartment half an hour before, shamelessly infiltrate themselves into the conversation, Lou Ellen pushing her head under Will’s arm and Cecil hooking his chin on Will’s shoulder, and skilfully obtain an invitation to come along.

On Wednesday evening, Will feels his usual cheery demeanour come back with vigour and while he motormouths his way through the conversation, the enthusiasm is deliberate and a little forced – he is embarrassed to admit most of his attention is captured by Nico.

Nico, despite the frequent glares and clipped answers that drip with flustered anger, is shy and hesitant in most of his movements, in his speech, and dress – understated and muted, as to make as little impression as possible, as if retention of someone’s impression is a bad thing. He does not drink, because it makes him slow and unpredictable, and he does not like to be unpredictable, he would later confess to Will. Nico rarely drinks alcohol and if he does, it is only a tumbler of scotch, just like he remembers his mother doing when he was younger.

Will talks and talks and talks, grins and smiles and laughs with Hazel, Lou Ellen and Cecil, but he is distracted.

Nico is not effervescent or amicable. Will finds his shyness endearing and his anger attractive – this is a new experience for Will, who never thought that someone’s penchant for glares and scathing remarks might be _attractive_ , but apparently, is a new truth for Will.

Thursday morning, he drives to the hospital with Lou Ellen, who is hungover and moody, but still chatty. Lou Ellen describes Nico differently, perfunctorily: “He’s hot. Total hottie.” She blows her chewing gum into a large, pink ball and pops it noisily.

“Oh,” says Will. “Right.” He thinks of Nico’s features, the dark look in his eyes that grip his attention.

“ _Right?_ That’s all you have to say?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Gods! How about agree vehemently, with enthusiasm? How about, _yeah, totes hot._ ”

Will smiles. “Yeah. Totes hot.”

Lou Ellen blows another bubble and grins at him. “I saw you gawking at the poor kid all evening.”

“Gawking?” Will splutters, embarrassed. Kid?

“Gawking, staring, salivating over. Whatever you wanna call it. You think he’s into guys?”

“I – I don’t know, gods. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Oh,” she purrs, “Why don’t _you_?”

“Lou Ellen.”

“What?” She pops another bubble. It sticks to her full lips. “I’m just saying. You could use some action.”

These kinds of things made Will uncomfortable. _Use some action_. For some reason, the words ‘use some action’ and Nico did not fit together, like two wonky puzzle pieces.

Will _mh_ ’s and changes the topic.

 

—

 

A few months later, during which Will attempts to insert himself into Nico’s life, with minimal success, Hazel and Nico’s grandfather dies.

This is how Will discovers that the di Angelo family is one of the most prominent families in the entire region. They own a large mansion some fifteen miles from the apartment building.

The amount of mourners coming to the burial is astounding. The grandfather, having lived until the hearty age of ninety four, is laid into a coffin, then put into an industrial-sized cremation oven, and his body is burned until all that is left is a pile off ashes gathered into an urn, subsequently scattered across fields in a last goodbye.

After the process finished, Will waits outside on one of the benches in the square outside of the funeral home. He feels an itch underneath his skin, an unsteady tingling that he wishes to scratch away. He wants to talk to Nico, to embrace him, to offer sympathies and talk to him like a bosom friend would.

Will waits for Nico. He wishes to comfort Nico – perhaps a foolish endeavour, as he is not sure any comfort is welcomed.

The entire mourning party is sweating in the day’s sweltering heat.

All around Will, family members and friends and acquaintances drink and eat, seated on the benches, but one by one they withdraw, either going home or clustering on the football field near the river about a ten minute walk from the di Angelo house. Will sees glimpses of Nico, but he zigzags across the square in order to take care of business that needs to be done, hosting duties that his mother is too tired to deal with. The family history is a little hazy. As far as Will knows, Nico’s father has had at least three wives. Nico’s mother is the second. The current wife, a dark-skinned woman named Persephone holding on to a bouquet of lilies, keeps sending nasty looks in Nico’s direction.

Will waits for Nico to come sit down and take a breather for five minutes. At a certain point Cecil sits down next to him and asks Will whether he wishes to join Cecil to go to the river with all the others.

“Go and talk a bit, walk around a bit,” Cecil says.

“No.”

Plain and curt, Will replies with a _no_ to each of Cecil’s advancements – it makes Will feel strange and unpleasant, as he normally never acts curt or shuts his friends out. Cecil notices the change and leaves him to himself after futile conversation.

Will is worried about Nico, who refuses to stand still. Frenzy and jittery movements is not something Will associates with Nico, and he wonders if Nico and his grandfather were very close.

By the end of the afternoon, Will has touched Nico exactly once – a brief touch on the hand, warm and soothing, and Nico quirked his brows and hastily retreated to the kitchen to help his sister – and Will has spoken to Nico exactly once, not even to offer condolences – this would probably not be welcomed, Will argues, as he has witnessed dozens and dozens of friends and family members do the same, only to receive a bland, “Thank you,” from Nico, whose inscrutable face appeared more lifeless than Will had ever witnessed.

The day ends much as it had begun: Will feels unsteady and wishes he could to something more, but is struck numb by the confusing situation: the mourning of the dead, the grandness of the di Angelo family, Nico’s unusual behaviour.

 

—

 

The days turn into weeks, and before Will knows it, three whole months have gone by since his upstairs neighbours moved in. Hazel has developed a strange friendship with Cecil, who is loud-mouthed and brash, while she is rather lovely and soft. They organize Sunday brunches each weekend and Cecil commands everyone to be present, Michael and Lee included, as well as the first-floor occupants, Mr. and Mrs. Rosso, who, for some unfathomable reason, have more or less adopted Cecil and Lou Ellen as their grandchildren. Mr. Rosso wishes to set up Lou Ellen and his grandson, Elias, but he seems to not know Lou Ellen prefers girls. Nico grouses each Sunday, groaning about overly cheery neighbours and the morning sun. Will spends most of these Sundays enjoying the loud chatter of his friends, as well as languidly staring at Nico as much as he can get away with without being noticed too much – which is to say, not a lot at all.

Will decides that he will no longer wait for Nico to make a move – a really dumb thing to wait for, really, Lou Ellen informs him staunchly.

One day, he invites Nico and Hazel to the balneum a town over. The balneum is an old facility modelled after the Roman baths in Europe and it attracts a great deal of tourists as well as locals.

They arrive mid morning and the balneum is already filled with visitors from the town. They walk around in the thermae with big towels wrapped around themselves. Nico looks slightly ridiculous with the big, white puffy towel, but Will notices none of this, as he is mesmerized by Nico’s wiry build, tantalizing glimpses peeking out in tune with each step he takes.

Feeling a little red, Will wishes they lived in times where men and woman walked freely in the nude in bathhouses. Some bathhouses divide genders and reserve certain spaces specifically for woman or man, but today they are mixed. Will struggles with the strong desire to place his fingers on Nico’s shoulders and pry loose the folded towel that would open his back.

Hazel notices Will’s staring and turns a bit red herself. She focuses on other people’s faces and the architecture of the building. Nico is oblivious – or so Will thinks, as he doesn’t see the small smirk on Nico’s face. It is a secretive thing, that Nico guards like a treasure.

Hazel once confessed to Will she did not dare to look below someone’s collarbones, afraid that she would upset them or insult them. She is terribly old-fashioned.

Will does not insult Nico, he adores him and caresses him with his eyes.

When Will looks up to watch Nico’s face, he has a small smile playing around his eyes, and they keep silent as Hazel continues to comment on the arches between the pillars – which, had they been able to focus their attention somewhere else, they would have noticed were indeed quite exemplary and beautifully constructed and decorated.

The three of them leave the main bath and move to a darkened room with a shallow pool. They leave their towels aside, step into the pool and submerge themselves. Above water, nothing seems to happen. Once submerged, Will is able to hear music.

Nico lies down next to Will.

Will slowly dares to trail his finger along the skin of Nico’s arm, up and down.

Will closes his eyes and enjoys the warm water and the wonderment of the people exclaiming at the music around him. Their laughter seems so innocent. His own thoughts are infinitely more impure.

They exit the pool some ten minutes later and return to the large bath. Before stepping inside, Hazel announces she needs to go to the bathroom.

Will feels a jolt of nerves, bites down on his lip, and clutches Nico’s hand. Nico seems surprised but does not pull away.

Hidden away in a dark corner at the end of the large bath, Will turns to Nico and together they live little trysts in the dark, a kiss on Nico’s eyelid in the shadows, his mouth on Nico’s shoulder, a finger creeping up Nico’s thigh.

Nico never makes a sound – neither of approval or enjoyment – and Will prays he is not ruining an already precarious situation or misjudging every hesitant look he had received from Nico over the past few months.

Suddenly, out of the darkness and into the light, Hazel, oblivious at their rapid retreat and their eyes, unable to seek each other out, appears in front of them and engages them in a conversation.

Their little love affair is put on hold and Will hates her for it – it surprises him. Will has no hate in his heart.

Nico, when he dares to look up, sees the impatience in Will’s features, and, when Hazel turns around to point at an ornate pillar, quickly gives Will a soft kiss to distract him.

Will experiences such rapture at this chaste gesture, he becomes silent.

After they declare to tire of the pool, Hazel leaves for the women’s changing rooms.

Will tugs at Nico’s hand and takes him into a labyrinthine staircase at the end of the large swimming pool. They arrive, red-faced and thoroughly kissed, at the exit of the building. Hazel is impatient and has been waiting for over fifteen minutes.

“ _Dio. Credo che non voglia sapere,”_ she says, flushed and flustered.

 

—

 

Will looks back on the first few months the di Angelo’s had lived above him. He curses the force of his nerves, the long months of hesitant eye contact, and slow exploration of interest. If only he had made a move months before, he could have enjoyed Nico for longer.

 

—

 

Nico lies asleep next to him.

Will finds he has strange dreams, of death and darkness, of sunlight and life.

In an endless wheat field, slightly damp from earlier rainfall, the remnants of which can be spotted in the dark grey thundering sky above, no life exists apart from the to and fro movement of the wheat stems waving in the wind. The suns – several of them, each battling for brilliance and lustre – shine radiantly

If a hand would float above the wheat crops, rich and plentiful, and give a hard tug here and there, the hand would gather spikelets of hulled wheat, wild einkorn. But there are no hands here. There are no mouths, or fingers, or toes, or knees, or thighs, there is only the wind crashing through the crops of wheat, weaving its way trough the roots and stems across the amber fields. The wind assaults the stems and kernels, enveloping them and caressing them with cool air. The rain has turned the wheat wet, and the wind spurs it on, heavy stems dangling in the air. The wind kisses the wheat. If Will had a mouth, he would place it on Nico’s centre, the top of the wheat plants, where they unfurl, there were he spasms and quivers, and Will would welcome the sun if it peeked through the clouds, temporarily warming Nico’s light skin and his dark hair amidst the pale wheat.

The sun shines blazingly, and slowly the wheat dries, and the fields burn, turning the ground as black as death. The wheat crops are set ablaze, and in the aftermath of the fire, the soil is turned fertile and warm.

Will awakens and turns to Nico, who is still and unmoving in sleep. He brushes some of Nico’s unkempt hair aside and sighs.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, yo, that was it!
> 
> Italian: 
> 
> "Do you need help?"  
> &  
> "Hazel, we still have dozens of boxes to unpack." - "Why are you so rude?" - "Leave me be."  
> &  
> "Gods. I don't think I want to know."
> 
> I want more of Nico speaking Italian. More! More!


End file.
